Tag Archives: wwi

Ah, superhero movies. They’ve become as ubiquitous and constant as a the sound of a river flowing to the sea. The money, likewise, flows from the pockets of movie-goers into the pockets of movie executives. I like the occasional superhero movie. I mostly like the ones that don’t act like Superhero Movies with a capital S and M–you know, the ones that are just movies first.

Wonder Woman was one of those superhero movies that was a movie first. The “superhero” part did come back to bite it in the end (and by “the end” I mean the third act), but it succeeded spectacularly by really respecting the audience as well as the themes and making it work in a context that by all rights should be somewhat ridiculous (she’s a bloody goddess; her family are bloody Amazons, literal Amazons).

But what really got my interested going into this movie, much more than the fact that it was a female-led superhero movie or that it was Wonder Woman’s first big screen adaptation or whatever, was the World War I setting. I was a little disconcerted by the confusion the trailer caused. So many people seemed to think it was World War II. It’s a little upsetting that people can’t tell the difference in uniforms and weaponry. Also a little distressing was a video review in which the video reviewer quite sedulously avoided naming the time period the movie took place in, because he clearly had no idea when WW1 took place.

Which is one reason I was excited, because it would give a little more exposure of a wide audience to the Great War.

It didn’t disappoint. Overall, the depiction of the time period and the war was really good. Not only did they got the facts right–they mostly did–they also got the tone right and hit some of the most important themes and lessons that emerged from that war. Those themes inform and shape the entire movie, and they’re universal. The main theme: there isn’t necessarily a Big Bad you can kill to make the world Right again. We’re our own enemies.

The Great War was messy. It was messy in terms of politics and in terms of the deaths it caused. There was no good reason for the war, not really. it was simply a series of political dominoes that led to all-out war. In this way, it’s a perfect setting to explore the moral ambiguity of war and good versus evil. Unlike in the Second World War, there was no clear “Bad Guy”. Wonder Woman uses that to its advantage, for instance when Steve Trevor, Diana/Wonder Woman’s male counterpart, says that he’s done terrible things, too, in the service of what he things is ultimately right. This even filters down to a moment when Diana wants to go directly to the Front, but he pulls her back and says that first they have to deliver the notebook he stole. She still sees Good and Bad, and thinks that killing Ares will erase the bad. Steve sees a messy conflict where delivering information can be a thousand times more vital than storming No Man’s Land.

The political messiness was mirrored in literal messiness. The trenches were muddy and miserable places. The deaths were ugly and horrifying. Perhaps worst of all were the gas attacks, which were unleashed for the first time in April 1915. The gas would blind men and/or damage their lungs so that they drowned in their own fluids. It was, along with machine guns and tanks and airplanes, one of the new horrors of warfare unleashed in the Great War.

So I appreciated the fact that the MacGuffin (look it up) they chase is a new and improved version of poison gas to be unleashed just as the Armistice is about to be signed. I don’t know that it was handled particularly well, but I appreciated that that was the angle they took.

I liked that Steve had to keep emphasizing that this war was nothing like anything Diana had seen. I thought they did a good job depicting the ugliness and horror of the trenches and the war-torn towns, within the confines of a PG-13 superhero movie. As far as the time period–I thought they handled Diana’s interaction with a very unfamiliar world intelligently and without making Diana seem stupid or too naive. The scenes with her and the secretary were wonderful. And they give more than a passing nod to the fact that Diana is not dressed AT ALL appropriately for Edwardian London. In many movies like this, she would just walk around in God knows what and there would be a few gasps and then it would be okay. Nope. They had to make sure a few times that she wasn’t traipsing around in a breastplate and miniskirt.

Now I have to go into a few things I did not like, especially in regards to the time period. While the scene of her crossing No Man’s Land is awesome to see, I just . . . don’t quite believe it. I suppose she’s basically bulletproof, but I don’t think that even with super speed she could dodge that many guns firing on her at once.

The Germans appeared to be very Nazi-like. This isn’t really accurate. While they were militaristic and had, in some ways, precipitated the war, they were not evil like the Nazis. So it rubbed me the wrong way to make them mustache-twirling villains.

Speaking of mustaches, and this isn’t entirely related to my critique of the depiction of the time period, can we talk about David Thewlis’s mustache? It worked just fine while he was Sir Patrick. But later, when he revealed himself as Ares? Then it did not work at all. It looked silly. Anyway, more on that twist later.

I was also a little baffled that the bad guy–Not Ares–was named Ludendorff. Why? Ludendorff was a real man, a real general in WW1, and he did not die in the war. He died in the ’30’s! So why make him a real person but have him die twenty years too early and be an evil bastard? Why not give him a different name? Also, aside from the oddity of being named for a real person but not being that person at all, he was kind of a useless character, and what was with that crazy white stuff he kept sniffing? There seemed no point to it.

There were a few plot holes that even I noticed, especially in act 3. For instance, Dr. Poison (who was a weak villain) appears to create a HUGE amount of her newest poison in about 24 hours. How does she manage that? And what is the crazy aircraft that its put it, that Steven flies to its–and his–doom at the end? The one he crashes in at the beginning–little more than a few sticks and some canvas–is more typical of the period. The one that holds the poison gas is . . . not.

Speaking of the poison gas . . . Well, first of all it’s basically the third act of The Dark Knight, substituting the Bat Wing for Whatever the Hell Steve was Flying and atomic bomb for poison gas. The same goes for this as for the bomb in Dark Knight: fallout. Just because he flew it up into the air and exploded it doesn’t mean that the poison gas wouldn’t effect those in the area. It could fall out of the sky like nuclear fallout. Second, there must’ve been some better way to dispose of it, surely?

Still, that sequence is saved by the interactions between Steve and Diana before he leaves. We actually care about both characters and about them together (the actors have great chemistry) so I was willing to happily overlook the somewhat questionable assumptions we were asked to make.

My biggest issue was the descent into a sloshy CGI Big Fight Scene. It’s apparently required for every superhero movie, but they’re all the same and mostly they are just a lot of noise. In this case, it was rescued by the fact that at least no cities are being destroyed and, again, we care about the characters. But I didn’t care about Diana and Ares (with his silly mustache) frolicking around in CGI glory amoungst CGI flames and explosions.

This may be a crazy idea, but I would have had no Ares. I would have had Diana kill Ludendorff and realize that there is no Ares, and that’s the arc. She learns that she was placing her trust in a magic-bullet kind of theory that was a myth. Of course, it’s a superhero movie, and the idea that there is no Ares wouldn’t jive with what has been established on this world (Zeus and Amazons and whatnot). So I don’t think my idea would work for this movie. But in a slightly different context, I think that would serve the story best.